Apologies (Blog Notes)

I got behind on comments again, and I apologize. I think I might have actually lost a reader over it; he thought I had censored him. No, just not persisting as I should. I'm sorry.

Time is speeding up, though. I couldn't believe it when I had to return the Leica D-Lux 7 two days ago. That week zoomed by so quickly I had to wonder if I hadn't spent part of it in suspended animation. I'll have some thoughts about the D-Lux 7 as soon as they percolate properly.

Anyway the Featured Comments have been added for the last three posts and all comments received up till noon today, Thursday, June 13th (what? The 13th already?!) have been published.

One-handed compliment
This next is very off topic, and it's esoteric in the extreme if you don't play tennis, but I was struck by it. A few months ago, Stefanos Tsitsipas of Greece fell to No. 11 in the world men's tennis rankings, and it marked the very first time since ATP rankings began in 1973 that there isn't a single player in the Top Ten on the men's side who plays the backhand one-handed.

The single-handed backhand was de rigueur for most of the sport's history, although there were a few two-handers here and there and from time to time. That started to change in a bigger way in the 1970s, when Chrissie Evert among the women and Jimmy Connors and Björn Borg (listen to how his name is actually pronounced) among the men used two-handed backhands. Despite the success of all three, it was still considered nonstandard back then, as well as a little odd and maybe even a little suspicious. Pete Sampras, as a 14-year-old around 1985, changed his backhand from two-handed to one-handed because he believed it would give him a better chance to reach the pinnacle of the sport. Today, you'd think an ambitious junior might be more likely to do the opposite.

(By the way, I have a 29-year-old friend—and he's a sports fan—who had never heard of Björn Borg.)

Dorothea Lambert Chambers (née Douglass) making a backhand, sometime before 1910

Ajla Tomljanovic hitting a two-handed backhand against Carla Suarez Navarro at the U.S. Open in August, 2014. Photo by Steven Pisano of Brooklyn, New York.

One-handed backhands are beautiful shots. When well done, they win the beauty contest. If Roger Federer didn't have the best one-handed backhand in all of tennis history, he might as well have. The two-hander just isn't as elegant. Kai Nishikori and Novak Djokovic have admirable two-handed backhands. Among retired players, Marat Safin and David Nalbandian were standouts. You might not exactly call them beautiful strokes, though. Saying a two-handed backhand is beautiful is like talking about the handsomest frog.

All England Club
The Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Wimbledon, London, will start on July 1. 'Twill be well worth watching. The game is at a very high level these days. I love watching both Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, the two best players in the world at the moment among the men. Sinner just achieved World No. 1 for the first time. As Andy Roddick put it about being No. 1, "if the Universe held a tennis tournament, Earth would send you." Rafa Nadal, the great clay-court champion now in the twilight of his career, will skip Wimbledon (played on grass) so he can keep practicing on clay for the Olympics in Paris later this Summer. It could be his swan song.

A great summer so far, and there's more to come.

Mike

P.S. I very much appreciated Lothar Adler's comment on the "Old Boat" post. I might need to do some soul-searching over that one.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Comments

[Peter Van Dyken]

Hello Mike, I was excited when you requested info on where on the web to sell photo equipment as I feel the same as yourself about e-Bay. Do you plan to share what you have learned? Thank you. Peter

[Yoshi Carroll]

My dad, avid tennis watcher of many decades, agrees with your estimation of the frog. "Especially the big guys" he adds.

Also, Lothar Adler is definitely on to something. It's a beautiful 'graph.

[robert e]

Happy to note that this week's men's singles top 10 includes a one-handed backhand, thanks to #10 Grigor Dimitrov. Been there since April 1, in fact. His is a lovely example, too. Apparently, Dimitrov's nickname on tour used to be "baby Fed" (as in Federer). Tsisipas is still hanging around at #11.

It's grass court season and in theory that's the friendliest surface for one-handed backhands. In the past, I'd have expected those two to improve their rankings over the next few weeks. But these days, most all the top players with two handed backhands are also highly proficient with the one-handed slice backhand (the kind most useful on grass), and proficient at countering it, too, so I'm not expecting that to happen. In fact, a good one-handed slice may be requisite for any pro today, given the very high level on tour. Alcaraz may have the best among two-handers. One could even argue that technically the one-handed backhand never disappeared from the top ten list, seeing as how every one of the the top ten use it routinely.

[James Weekes]

You may be too young to remember Ken Rosewall, an Aussie with a devastating backhand. Probably second only to Federer’s.

[David Robinson]

Justine Henin's single handed backhand one of the most beautiful tennis shots ever for me, work of art, plenty on youtube if you want to see.

[Kye Wood]

Staying up all through the wee hours to watch Wimbledon finals is a thrilling memory of my 20s. Then turning up to work and recognising others who had gone without sleep for the same reason.

Each shot is so high stakes, with almost zero margin for error... It's like watching two gunfighters in a Western.

Australia is a punishing place to watch live tennis.

[Jeff1000]

Bjorn Borg was a unique genius type of player: his strokes were pretty much his own invention. There wasn’t a teaching pro anywhere teaching Borg’s strokes to students, not that they could anyway.

Around 1975 Borg was playing the U.S. Pro at the Longwood Cricket Club, outside of Boston. Myself and two tennis buddies showed up there even though we didn’t have tickets. We hopped the fence and soon got run down by a security guard. I recall speaking for our group and saying, “we’re big fans of Borg but we don’t have tickets.” To my amazement he let us go in. We sat in the first row on metal bleacher seats viewing from the side of the clay court Bjorn was playing on. He came onto the court in his Fila duds and looked quickly at the spectators. He looked at us, with our imitation Borg haircuts. We we totally starstruck seeing this once in a lifetime player. He was our hero.

I’d like to add, if I may, one more terrific two-handed backhand to your list: Andre Agassi!

[Richard John Tugwell]

Re comments. One of your site's big issues is comment moderation. For a one-man operation manual moderation just doesn't scale, so if your site gets popular, comments get more problematic, and so potential long term followers might get pissed off.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think a lot of visitors are driven by the comments, and following up on comment posts. Because you have a lot of regulars, it has become a kind of community, even if that's perhaps not your intention.

A good solution, although probably impossible with your dated tech stack is to have some kind of verified user status, so that trusted users do not need comment moderation when posting

[Stephen J]

As is normal for me, I won’t watch any tennis this year.

However, if I can find it without sacrificing and arm and/or leg, I will be watching cricket, which is great to watch, the scoreboard being equally fascinating.

The other great spectator sport, along with being a lifelong participatory sport too, is golf. Despite the Churchillian quip that it was nothing but a "good walk ruined", it is one of the best ways to get exercise throughout one’s life.

[...If you walk.

And play every day? --Mike]

[Stephen J]

Greetings Mike, in reply to your above comment…

I tried to play golf in former years, but never got the hang of it, as my Dad’s lifelong friend and adequate golfer chum used to tell me when we were out together… "Don’t try to knock the cover off of the ball…”

This was always my issue, and after a couple of years of continually doing just that, I gave up.

However, I never gave up walking. I have had a serious medical issue, trying to pass kidney stones, which is commonly regarded as one of the most painful conditions that a human can suffer, followed by a massive overdose of morphine and ketamine.

(I also have the mis-titled condition known as Crohn’s disease. It is not a disease (bacterial or viral) but rather a genetic condition.)

I received this overdose in the ambulance and then less than an hour later at Guy’s Hospital, as a result of a mix up between ambulance and A&E staff.

Two years on and I am walking again, but suffer from vertigo and blinding headaches, which require regular bed rest.

I no longer have a day and a night, I now have two to three hour bouts of sleeping and waking on a 24 hour basis.

I am used to this now, and I regularly attend NHS sleep clinics, where they prescribe different cocktails of drugs, which never seem to work.

In short, I live like a wild animal that has to rouse itself in order to check for predators.

The best I have found is a micro dose of valium at about 22:00 hours to initiate sleep, and sometimes that gives me as much as 4 hours of continuous sleep.

However, when I am awake, I have a buzzing in my head and dizziness. I understand that this is taking a toll on my kidney’s and heart, so I keep attending this sleep clinic, ever hopeful that they will arrive at a serviceable cocktail of sedatives and stimulants.